With hard work and a little bit of luck
we can make the age-old dream of machines
with human-level intelligence come true in our lifetime.
And as Hans Moravec once pointed out, luck depends on having enough lottery tickets.
The rest calls for research. We're on it!

Natural intelligence, as
observed in humans and animals, is the result of multiple
systems and subsystems, implementing a complex pattern of
information flow and control. How can complex
interactions between a vast number of largely self-organized
functions produce a thinking mind? This question is first
and last an architectural one: how the system operates as
a whole. Without a deep understanding of architecture we
will never understand intuition, attention, insight, creativity,
or understanding itself.

My focus
is on how the architecture of mind can be implemented in
an artificial substrate. By building working
– running – models of mind we may be able to
kill two flies in one swat:
understand the mind and build a practical artificial
general
intelligence (AGI) systems that can be used for a myriad
of tasks, from helping us with the garden to solving difficult problems related to the ecosystem, nutrition, medication, and livelihood on this planet.

Con - struct - ion
- ist A.I.: Artificially
intelligent manmade system built by hand; learning
is restricted to combining predefined situations
and tasks, based on detailed specifications provided
by a human programmer. While the system may automatically
improve performance in some limited domain,
the domain itself is decided and defined by
the programmer.

Con - struct - iv -
ist A.I.:Self-constructive artificial intelligence system with general knowledge
acquisition and integration skills. Systems capable
of architectural self-modification and self-directed
growth; develop from a seed specification;
capable of learning to perceive, think and act
in a wide range of novel situations and domains
and learning to perform a number of different
tasks.

The evidence gathered so far on the nature
of intelligence makes it highly
unlikely that mind appears from a single or simple principle.
Even a small set of key principles seems unlikely; after
all, if it takes a myriad of closely coordinated mechanisms for an automobile
engine to run, why should a mind be any different? t At the level of the brain a mind results from interaction among a vast amount of
components, hooked up in complex, clever ways according to largely
unknown principles. This means that if we want to build very
smart machines, rivaling the human mind, we need to build
more integrated and complete systems than achieved to date.

The mind is a system, and my research to date indicates that
its operation needs to be captured
holistically to achieve truly intelligent machines.

My approach has followed two main traditions
in systems thinking. On the one hand is the familiar modular
decomposition from cognitive science and software development.
Modularization, object-orientation being one expression,
is the most accepeted method at present to construct complex
software systems by hand, including A.I. systems – what I call constructionist
A.I. Unfortunately this
method has severe limitations in the size of the systems that can be built, but until recently there really
wasn't a viable alternative available. There is
now; keep reading.

Have you ever seen a child take apart a favorite
toy? Did you then see the little one cry after realizing
he could not put all the pieces back together again?
Well, here is a secret that never makes the headlines: We
have taken apart the universe and have no idea how
to put it back together. After spending trillions of
research dollars to dissasemble nature in the last
century, we are just now acknowledging that we have
no clue how to continue - except to take it apart further.

— Albert-Lásló BarbasiLinked - The New Science of Networks(bold: KRTh)

As the proponents of the holistic systems
approach have pointed out (e.g. Varela, Maturana, Simon),
many complex systems have the elusive property that local
interactions between their parts are not sufficient to
explain, understand or predict the operation of the whole
system of which they are part. Software methodologies employing
traditional modular decomposition will not be sufficient
to allow us to construct such systems in the lab.

If we are ever to see generally intelligent
artificial systems we must
look towards methodologies that more directly allow us to
model and study complex phenomena, calling for an investigation
of the principles of self-organization and meta-control.
In short, we must employ methods that allow the system to
develop on its own, through self-constructive principles.
This is constructivist
A.I.

I have written two papers arguing for why
we need constructivist AI and why constructionist AI will never
give us AGI. In the coming years I will be writing
and publishing papers on the specifics of constructivist
AI and how to use it to build real systems that can do so.

Constructivist
A.I.

A.I. research on applying principles of
self-organization in the design and implementation
of A.I. systems is called
constructivist A.I. As it is becoming clear
that the manual construction process employed in most of
software development wil not be sufficient to construct the
kinds of complex architectures that we require for general
intelligence, our focus must shift towards using techniques
that allow systems to acquire their own knowledge and grow
on their own. Without such principles in hand it is unlikely
that we will we see systems with architecture-wide
integration of learning, attention, analogy making and system
growth. Our recently-awarded HUMANOBS project
grant from the EU will enable us to take notable steps in
this direction.

Constructionist
A.I. (not to be confused with constructivist A.I. - see
above) is a moniker given to the bulk of A.I. research being
performed around the world, where traditional software development
methods form the basis of the work.

In this tradition we
developed the Constructionist Design Methodology (CDM),
which takes the best from the existing such methodologies.
CDM has the goal of easing the creation of modular, complex
machines that incorporate some aspects of a world-mind interaction
loop – perception-action loop. We have used it on the HONDA
Asimo humanoid robot and Mirage
autonomus virtual agent [ watch
movie]. Mirage inhabits
an augmented reality; this complex system of integrated
heterogeneous components was designed and implemented in
as little as 2 mind-months using the CDM. We think it's directly
due to the application of CDM in the project [published
in A.I. Magazine, winter 2004]. We have also used
CDM for a live performance of the Robot
Opera in Reykjavik, 2006 [
watch movie] and 2007.